There’s a bit of controversy brewing in the UK press, as a result of a letter from academics and activists (including noted LGB activist Peter Tatchell, as well as some recognized trans-exclusionary reactionaries) published in The Observer (“We cannot allow censorship and silencing of individuals“). In it they call for universities to stand against what they felt was intimidation, specifically pertaining to discussions on trans* issues and sex work.

As a freelance writer and journalist, I could normally understand the concern of what they term no-platforming (alienating speakers like Germaine Greer and Julie Bindel because of past controversial remarks). And I can’t speak to the history of the controversy in the UK (of which this letter is just a part) as well as someone who has lived through it. But as a woman of trans* history and a former sex worker, however, I see that there is also some important context which is being forgotten.

In principle, of course, free speech is ideally responded to with free speech. Yet, when it comes to debates on issues pertaining to them, sex workers are typically either not given a platform at all, or else their perspectives are dismissed by default. Sex workers’ perspectives are systematically eliminated from the debate either by claiming that people who choose to engage in commercial sex are the exception and statistically unimportant; or by acting like they’re too silly to realize that they’re victims; or by claiming that a woman is somehow incapable of making a decision to consent to sex the moment money is involved.

Meanwhile, trans* people are starting to find public venues in which to speak, but this is still tentative, a novelty, and not always available. Trans* people have for decades been ignored or told to shut up and just deal with it, and after decades of being excluded from the discussion about them, all while facing a constant barrage of ignorance and invalidation, barbs eventually get through and wound. This is why trans* people react, and often with a lot of anger.

It’s also important to take into account the context of the debates in question. Debates on trans* issues (or at least those being protested) are often ones about whether trans* people should be accommodated within society — whether in womens’ spaces, in the health care system, in institutions like prisons (in which trans* women are often incarcerated with men or serve out entire sentences in solitary confinement), or in public spaces in general. Other arguments are be about whether or not trans* people are mentally capable of determining who or what they are, and whether that self-determination should be respected, rather than treating them as deluded dupes who should simply be disregarded (or grateful for no longer being institutionalized and/or lobotomized). And when it comes to sex workers, the debate is about whether they should be allowed to exist at all. These are not merely polite academic discussions. They directly pertain to trans* people and sex workers, and potentially affect their lives. There is much at stake.

Opinion columnists and speakers today do not usually make generalizations about or flippantly taunt most marginalized people. This isn’t because they fear the dreaded banhammer, but because we as a society have learned enough about many minorities to realize the need to show a little decency, empathy and respect. And if that line is crossed, the public usually understands the outcry.

Freedom of speech is not simply a question of saying anything that one might wish to say, but instead comes with a responsibility to face consequences when others call out attitudes that need to change. This calling out is precisely what is taking place when trans* people and sex workers protest the failures to extend the same balance, empathy and respect to them. While censorship may not be the ideal outcome (and violence or threats are unacceptable), outrage is often the only response that gets heard. And perhaps debating a minority’s rights without that minority having a significant voice in the process is becoming something that is no longer reasonable.

The authors of Sunday’s letter have failed to realize that crass invalidation, ridicule and indifference already stifles conversation, thus maintaining a status quo in which trans* people and sex workers remain the stuff of lurid sensationalism, cheap stand-up comedy, and demonization. Defending it all by crying freedom of speech abdicates any responsibility to be conscientious about the harm one does to entire minorities. It is also blissfully ignorant about the imbalance that exists between the reach of these speakers, versus the dearth of trans* and sex worker voices in mainstream discourse to act as a counterbalance.

And that risks becoming a case of “a little free speech for me, and a little shut-up-and-take-it-like-a-man for you.”

On Sunday, December 28th, 17-year-old trans* Ohio teenager committed suicide by stepping in front of a tractor-trailer on the interstate. She was killed instantly.

Her tragedy says something profound which has been almost completely missed in the discussion about LGBT-inclusive education and Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs) currently wafting across Canada.

Before Leelah Alcorn’s death, she posted a suicide note online. Some of the links to it are no longer working, but the text is archived at Slate. In it, she relates a heartbreaking story of a kid who learned what “transgender” meant at the age of 14, despite having always known in her heart that she needed to live as a young woman. [This I can strongly relate to, having not heard anything about trans* people until I was about the same age or slightly older. It was an age before Internet. I wept for days at the realization that there was actually a word for it — until then, I thought I was the only one, and that it was a character fault.] On telling her parents, they called it a phase, said it was impossible (that “God doesn’t make mistakes”), and taking her to Christian therapists, who told her that she “was selfish and wrong and… should look to God for help.” The situation grew worse:

“So they took me out of public school, took away my laptop and phone, and forbid me of getting on any sort of social media, completely isolating me from my friends. This was probably the part of my life when I was the most depressed, and I’m surprised I didn’t kill myself. I was completely alone for 5 months. No friends, no support, no love. Just my parent’s disappointment and the cruelty of loneliness…”

She felt like everything was closing in on her: her social isolation, the hopelessness of having to afford a mass of expenses (college, moving away from home and transition costs including surgery), what she perceived to be an insurmountable challenge of being too masculinized by hormones by the time she can start transition at 18 (a tragic misconception, as transition outlooks are still usually extremely good when transitioning that young), the fear of living a loveless life, and more.

Since her suicide, her parents have received a wave of anger from trans* people, and responded by claiming to have loved their child “unconditionally,” while still adamantly invalidating her and misgendering her:

“We don’t support that, religiously … But we told him that we loved him unconditionally. We loved him no matter what. I loved my son. People need to know that I loved him. He was a good kid, a good boy.”

The media coverage has turned into a circus, with various publications conflicting and editorializing over whether Leelah should be acknowledged as the person she understood herself to be or deliberately invalidated as per the family’s wishes. Meanwhile, the religious right response has been unsurprisingly vicious and negative, blaming trans* people for Leelah’s suicide, and that the real solution should have been more antagonism, reparative therapy, and invalidation until it somehow eventually overwhelmed her and somehow (inexplicably) made her feel better:

“The attitude that says we should be able to be what we want, no matter what, is dangerous. This Abby is complicit in her friend’s death. She encouraged wrong behavior. This wrong behavior created bad feelings or depression. This furthered Joshua’s depression and desire to make himself happy.

“Rather than saying gently and calmly that his problem was not that he was a girl trapped in a boy’s body, they should have said. “You’re a boy, in a boy’s body.” The confusion is that you are trying to be something that you are not meant to be, you’re not a girl…”

Others are calling for all trans* people to go “truck” themselves (i.e. commit suicide in the same fashion that Leelah did).

Since her suicide, vigils for Leelah have taken place across North America, including one in Winnipeg. Trans* activists are calling for a change in the discussion about the well-being of trans* youth.

With the extensive (and puzzling) debate over LGBT-inclusive education and Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs) in several provinces across Canada, there has been a considerable amount of ink spilled over a parent’s rights to deny their children information about sexual orientation and gender identity, and to deny the acceptance, validation and support of gay, bi- or trans* kids in schools as a matter of religious freedom of conscience.

And yet no one is talking about LGBT teens’ rights to acceptance, enfranchisement, freedom from harassment, and to learn about who they are. Or the right of non-queer teens to learn what society now largely knows to be truth about their peers.

In Alberta, the debate has even gone as far as enfranchising parents’ rights in a way that supersedes the rights of children and teens, in law.

Canadian school boards have begun recognizing the need to enfranchise lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans* kids. But will politicians and media do the same before Leelah Alcorn’s tragedy is repeated north of the 49th parallel?

There is a simple, time-honoured rule about attempting to “balance” human rights classes in legislation so that it works out a particular way every time, and it goes like this:

You can’t.

That is a court’s role. When two human rights classes are put into conflict in a way that creates hardships for both, a court becomes the arbiter, weighing the context of a given situation in order to determine which party has experienced the most undue hardship.

Legislating such a way that one party’s rights always supersedes the other creates a hierarchy of rights, and defeats the whole purpose of equal rights legislation.

Bill 10

That is what took place this week with Alberta’s Bill 10, which newly-crowned Premier Jim Prentice introduced to dump and replace Liberal MLA Laurie Blakeman’s Bill 202.

The latter bill sought to do three things:

Give students the right to form Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs) when and if they wanted to;

Remove a section (s.11.1) of the Alberta Human Rights Act which called for parents to be notified and either evacuate their children or opt them into anything that taught tolerance of LGBT people (interesting trivia: Alberta is the only jurisdiction in the world that has a “parental rights” clause like this, and it took several years to implement because no one was sure how it could work); and

Add a mention of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Alberta Human Rights Act to the Education Act.

Premier Prentice’s new Bill 10 does this:

Encourages school boards to allow GSAs;

Allow the students to sue the school boards if they don’t (presuming they can find enough legal help, information, support and funding to cover the legal expenses to do so, and ride out the years of delay tactics at boards’ disposal);

The bill also removes s.11.1 from the Alberta Human Rights Act, but makes changes to legislation which more or less negates the change, other than affecting the way complaints are addressed.

If at any point the Premier thought he had sliced through a Gordian Knot worthy of Alexander, he soon realized otherwise. As the bill came up for Third Reading, several amendments were proposed by opposition MLAs, and Prentice is now said to also be considering some of his own.

There are two central conflicts within this debate, one that is discussed frequently during many debates on social issues, and another which has been barely remarked upon at all.

“LGBT Rights vs. Religious Freedom”

The first is the false equivalence between LGBT human rights and religious freedom. The reason I call it a false equivalence is because what we’re really talking about is the complaint that the (“special,” as it’s sometimes called) right of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans* people to have equal access to employment, housing, services and other forms of enfranchisement is trumping the (“perfectly ordinary everyday?”) right to deny LGBT people any or all of those things. People retain the freedom to believe what they will, practice their faith, and speak their beliefs — all up to the point where doing so becomes harassing and disenfranchising to others. In most of the situations that are framed as pitting LGBT rights against religious freedom, this sort of conflict can only be considered equally-matched if you believe that coexistence is a violation religious conscience.

But the “gay rights versus religious freedom” argument has been losing steam, partly because the public at large is starting to recognize it as a ruse, and partly because the cause of religious freedom opens the possibility that the proponents’ religion will be placed on an equal footing with other religions, such as Islam, Satanism, or even Atheism. Hardline social conservatives like the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer have spoken out about this within religious circles, and more are starting to follow.

Consider this candid rant by Scott Lively, the pastor who is widely credited with having inspired Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act and Russia’s ban on “gay propaganda”:

“For about a year now I’ve been arguing against the use of “religious liberty” as a theme of Christian public advocacy. We retreated to that theme after SCOTUS Justice Hugo Black’s abandonment of the Bible’s authority in favor of a new “religious pluralism” standard in the 1940s-60s, starting with Everson v Board of Education (1947). That was the case that adopted Jefferson’s “separation of church and state” metaphor as a justification for declaring all religions to be equal with Christianity in America, and equally subservient to Secular Humanist authority…

“But God always provides a way of escape. (We’re only trapped if we accept the limitation of staying on their chessboard.) That narrow and difficult but God-honoring way is to stop arguing for “religious liberty” and resume our proclamation of the superiority of Christ and His Word over all opposing faiths (along with tolerance for people of other faiths — that‘s how it worked before Black). It’s goal must be nothing less than an official reaffirmation of the Bible as our legal and cultural foundation, which would require overturning Everson and its juridical progeny…”

It was never really about religious freedom.

“Parental Rights”

The other conflict that has been almost completely missed is the one between youth and parents. The argument made for parental rights clauses is that parents should have (using the language of Bill 10) the right “to make informed decisions respecting the education of their children.”

No one was ever stopping parents from teaching their children what they believe and encouraging their kids to follow their lead. What parental rights are actually about is the right to deny their children any information to the contrary.

And that only sounds like a good idea until you remember that the kids should have rights too. But by enshrining parental rights in legislation, the Province of Alberta is essentially prioritizing the right of parents to deny their kids knowledge (and emotional support, if their kid happens to be gay or trans*) over the right of children and youth to know. In some cases, it means that the attitudes of the narrowest-minded parents determine what everyone’s kids are allowed to know.

And when you say it for what it is, it doesn’t really sound like that brilliant a compromise.

Whether anybody wanted the conversation right now or not, it’s become time to have a conversation about BDSM, gender and entitlement.

Over a week ago, Jian Ghomeshi, the then-popular then- CBC commentator, appeared to be coming out of the closet about engaging in what he referred to as “rough sex (forms of BDSM),” and claiming to be fired because of workplace discrimination. The post read as sincere and from the heart (and badly timed because of his father’s passing), so we wanted to believe him. For anyone who cares about sex and gender minorities, there was a temptation to circle the wagons and voice support. There was a lot of discussion about the human right to one’s own sexuality, but then…

“Wait, what was that about allegations…?”

It took a moment before people realized the problem with not first hearing out and supporting the women who had spoken out about him. Canadians had been taken in by a public relations act that was either advised or coordinated by a top-rated PR firm. Nevertheless, the realization slowly filtered out that there was more to the story that deserved to be listened to and respected (and which, we learned, had already been voiced in the past, but no one had heeded).

“He did not ask if I was into it. It was never a question. It was shocking to me. The men I have spent time with are loving people,” said [actress Lucy] DeCoutere, who, when she is not acting on the television show, is a captain in the Royal Canadian Air Force in New Brunswick…

“… One of the new women to come forward is a woman in her mid-20s who was a CBC producer in Montreal who dreamed of being on Q. He met her at one of his book signings. Ghomeshi allegedly took her to his hotel room, threw her against the wall and was very “forceful” with her. She said she performed oral sex “to get out of there.” The woman, who still works in the media but not at CBC, said she decided not to complain about his behaviour because she feared he was too powerful…”

“… A CBC employee in her late 20s alleges that in 2007 Ghomeshi was sitting with her and other producers at a story meeting for his radio show Q . After their colleagues stood up and left, she alleges Ghomeshi leaned in close to her and quietly said “I want to hate f— you…“

Lest anyone complain that women should have spoken up sooner or more publicly, there are painful consequences to speaking out about sexual or gender-based violence, and so unfortunately, few women do. YMCA of Canada reports that of every 1000 sexual assaults, only 3 actually lead to a conviction. It’s even worse when the person in question is an acclaimed public figure. Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon urges people to do the math:

“On this side, there’s a successful, well-liked male public figure. And on this one, there’s a likely trail of sexually charged messages. There’s woman who in many situations agreed to go on a date, agreed to go to a private place with a man, maybe even agreed to see him more than once. And awaiting her is a culture of vindictiveness and retaliation that is so terrifying that women who appear in videos about catcalling get rape threats, and women who speak out about feminist issues get doxxed and harassed and murder threats. It’s a culture in which public sentiment can be cruel and law enforcement is often reluctant to assist…”

#IBelieveLucy and #IBelieveWomen. And given that Jian Ghomeshi has seen fit to disclose his perspective and make this a public spectacle, I no longer see any obligation to avoid speculation.

Believing women is the first part of the discussion. If you believe women, then you must also be prepared to take a harder look at gender, social power exchange, and entitlement.

No Excuse to Abuse, Nor to Assume

Ghomeshi also dragged kink into the mix, by using it as an excuse for his sense of male entitlement. If I know anything about kinky people, it’s that using BDSM as a way to mask abuse is not going to sit well. Fortunately, kinky folks weren’t about to let him claim anti-BDSM discrimination lightly. Even when they wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, they usually did so conditionally, pending more information. Some people spoke up about what BDSM is, to provide a standard against which Ghomeshi’s behaviour would be measured when it was learned.

Very quickly, there were problems apparent with Ghomeshi’s account — or at least of his hiding behind ethical BDSM while making his argument. When a person is significantly younger (which can — but doesn’t always — translate into a difference in maturity level) or perhaps starstruck — situations where they might make decisions they wouldn’t otherwise normally make — consent can become a grey area, well before kink has become a part of the equation. In BDSM negotiation, there is a responsibility to ensure that there is no undue imbalance. Certainly, an adult is still capable of consenting if they’re not as old as their potential partner, or if they’re starstruck… but the potential for imbalance creates a greater responsibility to assure clear consent, and that one is receiving it from someone who is fully aware of what they’re getting into. It was pretty clear that Jian Ghomeshi had not only failed this doubly-due diligence, he was oblivious to it.

I encourage readers not familiar with BDSM to read Andrea Zanin’s discussion of how healthy, consensual BDSM practices are actually supposed to work. If you’re uncomfortable reading about it, or can only deal with the TL/DR, the keys are that BDSM is supposed to be something that happens between two people who are mutually interested in it, requires clear and thorough negotiation, acknowledges that consent is an ongoing process during which it can be withdrawn at any time, and also calls for aftercare.

“We adjust based on verbal and non-verbal feedback. In some scenes, this feedback loop can become so instantaneous that it’s as if you’re both experiencing the same sensations. For some of us, this kind of deep connection and intense intimacy is the whole point of BDSM play. If someone uses a safeword or withdraws consent in any other way, that’s not a failure or a loss – it’s a sign to stop, check in, and perhaps end the scene. Why? Because the point here is mutual enjoyment, not playing out an agreed-upon scenario to its bitter end...”

It’s worth adding some discussion about power exchange and about gender. And it’s a hard discussion to have, because there are polarized camps within feminism about BDSM: either it is seen as a reinforcement of gender inequality and inherently harming to women, or else it is seen as a question of a person’s own right to their sexuality, and to pursue what each individual needs within an ethical construct. I have trouble with seeing it as being “inherently” harming, having known people of all genders and roles who find it to be cathartic (not always, but when / if they’re so inclined), and find that the reinforcement of gender inequality stems from the already-existing social norms, which have shaped how BDSM is received and portrayed — more a symptom than a cause (more on that later).

There are a lot of different practices lumped into BDSM (an acronym meaning bondage & discipline / dominance & submission / sadomasochism), but most of them involve an element of power exchange. This is the most fascinating aspect, because when one follows the threads and implications, it actually teaches some profound things about social justice. But for now, the basic understanding is that in most BDSM encounters, it is a question of one person surrendering power within a negotiated framework, while another accepts power and the responsibilities that go with it. There are two crucial points to this: 1) a person must first have power in order to be able to surrender it (so there must be a start from an equal footing), and 2) an exchange of power can never be assumed, guessed at or taken for granted. That second point is especially key here.

Syndicated columnist Dan Savage theorized that if Ghomeshi was honestly engaged in BDSM to any degree, there would likely also be women who have had a kinky relationship with him that they consider to have been positive. He found two so far who were willing to speak anonymously (after verifying their history via texts / emails and verification through friends). But what they relate — even if the women themselves were fine with what took place — is a picture of someone who would “initiate” with roughness, and interpret how they respond as whether or not they consented. Which is not how consent or negotiation work:

“… I think I can square the two Ghomeshis.

“The woman with whom I spoke doesn’t live in Toronto. She and Ghomeshi flirted via text and Skype for weeks before finally meeting up to have sex. And in that time—over those long weeks of flirting—a mutual interest in BDSM was established (file under “lucky coincidence”) and she consented to the things Ghomeshi was floating in their texts and chats. The woman who was interviewed on As It Happens, on the other hand, lives in Toronto. Ghomeshi flirted with this woman in person. And instead of telling her what he was into—instead of talking with her about BDSM—Ghomeshi chose to show her what he was into: he grabbed her hair in the car and asked, “Do you like this?” When she hung out with him again, when she came back to his apartment with him, Ghomeshi concluded—erroneously and self-servingly—that the answer to the question he asked her in the car was yes. Yes, she liked it. Yes, she liked it rough.

“I’m not suggesting that this was all a big misunderstanding. I’m not suggesting that Ghomeshi innocently misread the signals of the woman who was interviewed on As It Happens or the women who spoke to the Toronto Star. But the only explanation that reconciles the stories of the now four women who claim they were assaulted by Jian Ghomeshi with the story of the one woman I spoke to today is this: Ghomeshi isn’t a safe, sane, and consensual kinkster. He’s a reckless, abusive, and dangerous one who has traumatized some women and lucked out with others…”

Consent cannot be presumed beforehand. One does not subject someone to roughness before negotiating the terms of that exchange. Indeed, it’s almost as though Ghomeshi thought that only sex (that is, the act) needed to be consented to… that the violence was just for free. And that would indicate a stunning sense of entitlement.

Not Responsibility, But Entitlement

When collected, the accounts of Jian Ghomeshi’s behaviour paint a picture not of ethical, responsible and consensual behaviour, but of a sense of profound entitlement in which he saw no issue with striking a woman first, and then making a judgment for himself whether she was interested in continuing.

Did he not trust women enough to discuss things clearly and honestly with them first? Did he think himself a better judge of what women want than than the women themselves? If a woman’s clear, cognizant, continually-negotiated consent (let alone mutual interest!) isn’t important enough to obtain verbally before striking her, that is a stunning and dangerous sense of entitlement.

When Jian Ghomeshi posted his original message to Facebook, he compared his interests to Fifty Shades of Grey. This raises the obvious problem with associating an entire sexual minority and subculture with a character who undertakes things like emotional abuse, coercion and stalking. It also illustrates the need to have more open, honest communication about it. As long as BDSM is kept under a cloak of secrecy and taboo, it remains possible for it to be poorly characterized by bad fiction — and by extension, allow people with predatory tendencies to use it to rationalize their behaviour.

Entitlement is a very gendered discussion. While it’s conceivably possible for it to flow the other way, entitlement in practice is by far a male-favouring phenomenon.

Probably fittingly, Fifty Shades of Grey provides an excellent example of this. One has to wonder how the novels would have been received if they pivoted around a powerful woman with obsessive control issues, manipulating and intimidating a young man. Even if it had depicted a respectable, ethical dominant woman engaging in a fully consensual and loving relationship, would the novels have been such a commercial success? When a person starts looking into it, in fact, virtually every BDSM-themed work of fiction that has achieved contemporary mainstream success has centered around a power exchange which has been gendered with a male dominant and female submissive… despite the variety that exists in reality. The Story of O, Secretary, L’Image, 9 1/2 Weeks, The Night Porter, the Sleeping Beauty books… the only ones that achieved commercial success while deviating from the script were Exit to Eden, and the over-a-century-old Venus in Furs.

In kink circles, power exchange is independent of gender, and there’s no gender which is “naturally-born” to dominate or “meant” to submit. But the general public isn’t interested in that diversity. Aside from the fetishistic image of the dominatrix (possibly exactly because the latter is challenging), BDSM is portrayed with male dominance and female submission as the primary palatable gendered permutation.

And that is because it’s familiar. The manipulation and animalistic sex found in Fifty Shades of Grey is not altogether very different from the rough sex scenes found in mainstream novels and cinema. But the problem extends beyond mere sex. It is a power exchange — though not conscious, not consensual, and not negotiated — which runs as an undercurrent throughout our daily lives and throughout our world.

And that is how someone can walk into a meeting and be reportedly confident that his employers will see everything as consensual:

At that meeting, a lawyer for Mr. Ghomeshi presented two people from CBC management with texts, e-mails and photos of the radio host’s sexual encounters. The evidence was intended to demonstrate consent, a point Mr. Ghomeshi would later stress in a statement: “Everything I have done has been consensual.”

But the CBC managers were taken aback, and their views on Mr. Ghomeshi’s conduct changed instantly. What they saw, in their opinions, was far more aggressive and physical than anything they had been led to believe during months of discussions.

So what next?

The positive thing that can come from events like this is that they spur discussion.

One important discussion that has begun centers around why women are afraid to report rape, the need to support women who report, and the institutional barriers to reporting, investigation and conviction of rapists.

Another discussion needs to be about male entitlement, and the privilege that makes it invisible. Gender-based violence does not happen because of low reporting, disbelief, or institutional barriers. Those are the end-products of something deeper. It happens because there is a persistent and unconscious sense of ownership and entitlement that still makes gender-based violence seen as excusable, or “normal enough.”

And although people might not be eager about this thought, Jian Ghomeshi can even be a part of that discussion, too. Maybe someday, he could become a powerful voice on the topic. But that will first mean needing to realize, admit and take the time to become absolutely clear about where he failed. There is no more room for assumptions or skipping details.

On Tuesday, October 28th, Peter LaBarbera re-entered Canada for an immigration hearing, then to speak at an anti-LGBT conference, and finally on Thursday to face charges for mischief (which stem from an arrest while distributing anti-LGBT leaflets at the University of Regina).

LaBarbera (nicknamed “Porno Pete” by bloggers because of his penchant for filming pride parades and gay BDSM events in the name of “research”) has returned to Canada at the invitation of Bill “Anal Warts” Whatcott (so nicknamed because of his fondness for distributing graphic depictions of anal cancers and other deliberate shock leaflets).LaBarbera was briefly detained, searched and questioned by Canada Border Services — or as American social conservatives call it, persecuted by “homofascists.” In the process, though, border services did seize a DVD copy of the Russian anti-LGBT documentary, Sodom. As the film is available to view in English on YouTube, LaBarbera and Whatcott proceeded to show it at their conference, anyway.

Personally, I’m not a fan of censorship. I realize there has to be a limit to propriety, and not just when someone advocates for mass-murder. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion didn’t actually call for Jews to be put to death, for example, but it created such an inflammatory environment that violence became inevitable.

But given that LGBT people are just as at risk of being silenced in the name of propriety (maybe even for giving people snarky nicknames), I’m still not keen on censorship. Part of the whole reason for LaBarbera’s visit is to strategize about how to bring about a Russian-style “gay propaganda” ban in Canada, after all.

So, I still prefer to let people speak freely, and once they’ve had enough rope, show people what they’ve done with it. And in that vein, I bring you:

Sodom: The Review

And yes, it will be triggery.

Sodom first aired on Russia’s government-funded Rossiya-1 station in September. It presents itself as a sensational expose* of the sinister gay rights plot to forcibly transform society into one that accepts any and all evil, while eradicating truth, freedom, religion and decency.

You might think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not. Sodom was originally filmed and written for a Russian audience that had already been scared into an anti-LGBT frenzy resulting in incidents of violence noted worldwide. This furor was accomplished by speakers like Scott Lively (who appears many times in the film), who conflated LGBT people with pedophiles, and claimed that the Nazi party started out as a gay plot. Lively’s activism resulted in a ban on “gay propaganda,” which is essentially anything that can be seen as LGBT-positive (or perhaps even acknowledge their existence in a non-condemning way), in any environment where children might hear or see it. In this context, Sodom is able to fearmonger unchallenged, and get away with all sorts of wild claims. In Russia, the film received high ratings and was critically acclaimed.

But it’s a bit different for a Canadian audience: people who have coped with LGB(t) human rights for over a decade and lived with same-sex marriage since 2006 without descending into a stylish shock-troop cavalcade. Canadians largely (with exceptions) didn’t mind having to coexist with LGBT people or do business with them in the past few years… although that’s starting to change now that Americans are framing it as a violation of principle that’s going to send them (and all society) to eternal damnation.

But belief is a powerful persuader, which can goad the faithful into ignoring all evidence and reason, in favour of conjectures, no matter how grand. Although I refuse to dignify far right homophobia and transphobia as being a “Christian” perspective (because certainly not all Christians espouse it), it should be recognized that leaders like LaBarbera and Whatcott still manage to frame it as such, and that can have a strong influence on people who view it as their duty to believe. Those people don’t have to question God if they don’t want to… but they should most certainly question the people who claim to be speaking for him.

I don’t speak Russian, so I can’t say how much of the English translation of Sodom was polished up for a Western audience. I am under the impression that very little was changed, if anything. Which is surprising, because if any film needed to sweep its extremes under the translation rug, it was this one.

LGBT people are repeatedly conflated with pedophiles within the film, and homosexuality is claimed to be inextricably interwoven with child molestation. There is a suggestive undercurrent of this throughout the film, nudge-nudge-wink-wink, but at times, the narrator is also far more explicit.

“Sodomites pay attention to mysticism and different symbols,” we are told. With jump-cuts of historical artworks and occasional allusions to rites, the film tries to artfully connect LGBT people to devil worship without actually saying it out loud. Because that is apparently seen by the filmmakers as the limit of believability.

LGBT people are said to have conspired to rewrite the Bible, in order to make scripture accommodate them (rather than simply critically re-examining the clobber passages). In the western world, apparently everyone who is lesbian, gay, bisexual or trans* (LGBT) owns a copy of the Queen James Bible.

Language is crucial in Sodom. It’s quite clear that the film translators much prefer the term “sodomites” to describe LGBT people. It ties into the title of the film, and is keyed to keep the focus on sex acts in the hope that doing so will make viewers uncomfortable or outraged. Likewise, trans* people are referred to as “transvestites,” lesbians referred to as belonging “to a new sex tribe,” and when all else fails, “perverts” will suffice. The idea of “mama and mama” is made to seem puzzling, bizarre, disgusting and scandalous.

In the early scenes of the film, Scott Lively explains that Russia is at the first stage of gay activism: “Well, let me explain how this works. There is a five-stage process of cultural conquest. Five steps. It begins with a request for tolerance. Once the gays have achieved tolerance — and tolerance is just the right to be left alone — then it’s a demand for acceptance, and acceptance means equal status. Then comes celebration — that everyone must accept homosexuality and promote it as a good, valuable thing. Then comes forced participation: everyone must participate in gay culture. And then comes punishment of everyone who disagrees.” LGBT people must not be even tolerated, he argues, because that’s the first step that leads to everything else.

“The average American is not in favor of homosexuality,” Lively claims. “But they are afraid to speak publicly about it, because the gays have so much power and they can do harm to those people. Most people are vulnerable to some sort of intimidation, especially if they are in any position of influence, or in the media spotlight.” Lively welcomes the initial nod of an agreeing taxi driver as evidence… though the driver later seems to change his mind and want to be left out of the discussion (“no, no”) but is creatively edited to appear as though he’s simply gesticulating. Moments later, in front of the office building occupied by the LGBT establishment organization, Human Rights Campaign, Lively says “they are trying to declare that homosexuality is a human right. And they’re devoting massive amounts of money to promoting this agenda around the world, instead of addressing genuine human rights.” The HRC is apparently such a monolithic fundraiser that poor, underfunded churches can’t keep up the opposition.

Next, the film makes a stop at London’s Tavistock Institute of Human Intelligence, which during World War II was exploring “new methods of psychological war, not only against fascist Germany, but also the Soviet Union.” Tavistock is said to have conspired with the CIA to create the MKULTRA project, for the purpose of manipulating people. While Canadians may see this as an aside, to a Russian audience, the suggestion is planted that England is still engaging in psychological warfare against them today. Naturally, the producers find someone “who knows a lot about this” apparently super-secretive institution, Daniel Estulin, who claims that the Tavistock Institute “is the place which created and later imposed on the consciousness of European youth such cultural accents as ‘free love,’ orgy, and civil marriage.”

MKULTRA did indeed experiment with hypnosis, behaviour modification, physical and sexual abuse, LSD, and sensory deprivation. There have also long been claims that Tavistock contributed to the program. But in Estulin’s estimation, MKULTRA was really a “fifty- or hundred-year plan” to normalize homosexuality and sexual liberation, “literally to change the paradigm of modern society.” The film also alleges that “the psychological components of the Ukrainian Revolution — chants, behaviour models, slogans — were also created here.” Estulin cautions that the endgame is “genetic manipulation to eliminate memory,” and warns that after lesbians, gays, bisexuals and trans* people are accorded equality, “… then you can have transhuman. You can have post-human. You can have man-machines, such as the Terminator. You can have cyborgs. You can have beings that are not totally human as a result of synthetic biology, because today you can literally create a human being in a laboratory.” And frighteningly enough, I guess, they might all want human rights.

The filmmakers also pay a trip to The Fertility Institutes in Los Angeles, where the segment opens with the clinic doctor bragging that they’ve become world-famous for being able to choose a boy or a girl. Here, they examine LGBT parenting by taking viewers through the clinical process of in-vitro fertilization, complete with ominous music, in a way that is meant to create a chill over the cold sterility of the process. They make repetitive claims that gays always want boys and lesbians always want girls (and of course, there could be no alternate explanation for that, nudge-nudge-wink-wink): “Green is genetic disorders, like Down’s Syndrome, or they have a genetic problem. Okay? But most of them have boys and girls. The male gays want boys, and the female gays want girls,” the clinician generalizes with a large grin that is lingered on, suggestively.

There is ample film time spent on Pride parades, as the film editors cut in every example of nudity or garish costumes that they can find, interspersed with footage of kids and teens in attendance. BDSM folks turn up frequently, and some of the footage looks like it actually comes from the Folsom Street Fair, in a way that makes one wonder if Porno Peter LaBarbera was behind the camera (alas, I can’t find the film credits, or I’d check). “Aren’t you afraid your child would want to become like them?” The narrator asks one parade onlooker, being careful to stay within the perception of choice and whim, and avoid any thought that sexuality could be something intrinsic and individually-rooted. “Naw,” is the reply, “we actually want to encourage him to see everything, everything in the world…”

“Sodomites unconsciously understand that what they are doing is wrong,” the narrator assures us, as the camera searches the crowd for any expressions that could seem sad, scared, or otherwise negative. “However, on the surface, everyone makes an effort to express joy,” he adds, coming up short of appropriate footage and needing an explanation. Then, they do their level best to depict children of LGBT people as unhappy, ashamed or even terrorized… rather than simply intimidated by being in a large crowd with so much activity taking place. “The child’s soul feels that everything around them contradicts nature’s law.”

Surrogacy is the next focus of attention. Remember that Russia is currently debating banning out-of-country adoptions and / or adoptions by LGBT parents. “Where there is no woman,” the narrator asserts, “there is no continuation of life. But sodomites try to bypass the laws of nature. Large sums of money are spent on exactly this: mother-mother, father father.” At this point in the film, IVF and surrogacy are both portrayed as human trafficking. “The sodomites have paid for and received living goods for their money.” The film returns to the assertion that gay parents want only boys, and lesbians want only girls: “for what? Perverted acts?” Naturally, a pair of men in New Zealand that subjected their adopted child to heinous abuse and were convicted of molestation are now given ample screen time, and portrayed as evidence that this is the norm. They allege by extension that all children of LGBT parents are brainwashed into covering up abuse and “to think that this sort of behaviour was acceptable.” The surrogate mother in this case had been Russian: the intended lesson is clearly that western LGBT people are taking advantage of Russian mothers to provide exploitable children through adoption. IVF is even framed as a genocide in which one child is created but many others are destroyed. “It’s an unnatural process.”

Sodom also takes aim at a lawsuit against a florist, Baronelle Stutzman, who refused to sell flowers to an LGBT couple. Because of the gay mens’ intolerance and ignorance, we are told, Stutzman is likely to lose her house and her business. Viewers are manipulated into tears and rage at the thought that the special right to have equal access to goods and services has trumped the perfectly ordinary, everyday, sensible right to deny someone else exactly those things. “But why are the rights of all the other people violated in the light of the first?” the narrator later asks.

There is an undercurrent of discussion about neocolonialism that infuses the film — or more honestly, one that hijacks the discussion of neocolonialism. There are plenty of examples of anti-LGBT conferences and meetings with religious and political leaders by people like Scott Lively, and it is actually American groups’ homophobia that has been trying to change Asian, European and African nations through fearmongering and lobbying. But the film reverses this so that the American government is portrayed as deliberately promoting homosexuality around the planet, “as plague, as cancer.” Yet corporate globalization, militaristic interference, and widespread espionage are not identified as colonial problems… only homosexuality. One Moldovan political leader relates how his attempts to ban a pride parade resulted in a stern talking-to from an American-connected diplomat. How fascist.

Later in the film, prison rape takes centre stage, with abuses in Gldanskaya (a Georgian prison) that are claimed to have been directed by an American puppet dictator and inspired by Abu Ghraib. The abuses are portrayed as a deliberate attempt to spread homosexuality through non-consensual torture. “There was one goal: to break, diminish and humiliate.” They later add, “the same thing awaits people who aren’t accordant with the regime in Ukraine. The pro-American regime will use the same methods in jails and prisons. There are currently thousands imprisoned from Kiev to Odessa, and only God knows what is being done to them.”

As the film winds to its conclusion, it presents Russia’s law banning “gay propaganda” as the solution, warning that any insufficiently condemning representation of LGBT people is dangerous. Father Mikhail, prior of the Saint Georgiy temple in Tblisi explains: “Everything begins with a harmless character in a movie or a sitcom. This man is obviously homosexual, but he is funny, witty, and then it stops. He disappears. Then another film, then a few more. It’s like a poison in small doses. It won’t do anything to you right away. But with time it gets bigger and stronger, and the tolerance of the system weakens, accepting it more and more each time.” It underscores Father Mikhail’s point with visions of HIV and gay BDSM. “Russia occupies one of the leading positions” in restoring order, the narrator says. “The law banning gay propaganda, a return to traditional values, and the strengthening of the faith of the nation… all this postpones the end of times.”

What separates Sodom from something like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (aside from the choice of minority group that is targeted) in a place like Canada is the context. Here, everyone has a friend, or a family member, or a co-worker who is gay or lesbian, or bisexual, or trans*. There is a familiarity that is comfortable. There are certainly people who are closed-minded to LGBT rights, or are susceptible to a feeling of culture shock at social change, or don’t know (or don’t care to know) any of the issues LGBT people face… but for the most part, Canadians recognize people as people, and don’t feel all that threatened when those people fail to adhere to rigid cultural hegemonic expectations.

The situation is far different in Russia. Fewer people know LGBT persons, and with the “gay propaganda” law and potential for violence driving them further into the closet, the next generation is far less likely to have any familiarity with them. In this environment, Sodom is a tinderbox, ready to ignite. In this context, Sodom cannot help but trigger violence and rage. There isn’t even the usual lip service to loving the sinner but hating the sin.

LaBarbera and Scott Lively have formed the Coalition for Family Values specifically for the purpose of bringing Russia-inspired laws banning gay “propaganda” to western nations:

“The Coalition for Family Values will be encouraging our current and future affiliates throughout the world to lobby their own governments to follow the Russian example. While the LGBT agenda has seemed like an unstoppable political juggernaut in North America and Europe, the vast majority of the people of the world do not accept the notion that sexual deviance should be normalized. It is time that these voices are heard on the world stage before the so-called elites of the Western powers impose their inverted morality on everyone through the manipulation of international law, which they clearly intend to do…”

And that starts with eliminating LGBT-positive portrayals and human rights protections. But they’ll have the public believe that they are the true victims of a colonial and fascist agenda.

“One of the things I was pondering recently was triggered by me seeing a pic of a five year old trans girl. I began to ponder what her Trans World that we 2K10’s activists are fighting tooth and nail to shape, would be like 10 to 20 years from now…”

Any time we try to wax prescient about a social issue and its future, we have to be careful not to forget the pendulum effect of social progress. We have a period of great strides, then a stage of regression, then more advances. I believe Dr. King understood this before anyone in human rights movements, when he spoke of the arc of the moral universe being long but bending toward justice: it is glacial, and fraught with forward-then-backward strides, but it eventually inches forward. The trans* movement is definitely in a forward swing, no doubt about it, but eventually we’ll hit another backward slide before advancing once again.

But it’s also crucial to see our own social movement as part of a much larger picture. More on that in a moment.

Trans* communities still have a few more years of forward motion, no doubt. The far-right religious persecution complex is unconvincing, and the longer washroom panic is touted but fails to manifest in actual harm, the faster that tactic evaporates. If Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism (TERFism) manages to change some of the thinking within feminism, that contraction could come sooner, but I don’t believe it will, unless we play too eagerly into TERF persecution games. More likely, that contraction will happen because of changing priorities. Something more urgent will come to the fore, and we’ll once again be seen as a 0.01% -sized minority… and that will trigger the next stagnation or regression.

We also have to keep in mind that social movements have a horrible track record of turning on their own, as the difficulties of earlier generations becomes forgotten. I see a time coming when youth (not this particular generation of youth, who are fighting pioneering battles of their own, but perhaps the generation that comes after them) start being unable to understand how it could have been so difficult to come out or why people would have waited until their late 30s, 40s, 50s or older to begin transition. And with we older folks being more ravaged by incongruent hormones (especially for trans women, since testosterone is such a vicious chemical), lookism will become a serious issue, as well as greater inter-movement criticism about socialization (sometimes deserved, sometimes overstated). There will inevitably be a new quest for the “appropriate face” of the movement, as if such a thing could exist, and increasingly those who pioneered progress for trans* people will become seen as a liability to that.

There is a bright side, though, which is found by looking at the larger picture. Social progressives have reached a wall. The corporate, religious and political worlds have merged into an oligarchic monolith that we cannot face any other way. In order for *any* social movements to progress in the larger scheme of things, there has to be a coming together, and getting away from colonial / umbrella-style thinking so that we can all rediscover what it means to be an alliance: that it’s not an assimilationist melting pot, the borders of which need to be rigidly policed and people either belong or they don’t (we keep trying that and failing), but rather a critical mass of varied and unique individuals who all deserve a voice and (the harder part) who all also need to listen… and who stand together for mutual advancement, equitably. Feminism, racial justice, environmentalism, labour rights, sexual minority equality (LGBTTIQQA2S, as well as poly people, sex workers and other emerging groups), issues of global climate change, reproductive rights, classism, privacy rights and personal liberties (as opposed to neoliberalism), the rights of the disabled, the rights of youth (as opposed to parental ownership), economic justice… in the near-term, all of our destinies are bound together, even if our objectives differ and sometimes even conflict. The political left is going to have to decolonize if it is to survive. It will take time, but the need will be for everyone to have a seat at the table. We no longer have the luxury of infighting… it’s time to either work this stuff out, or else to put the differences aside.

Those lessons will be hard. The lesbian and gay establishment is still learning that it cannot speak for trans* people, but rather need to empower them. Some pockets of feminism, likewise, remain too blinded by dubious data and an ideology that says that all sex work is inherently victimizing to actually listen to sex workers when they speak out about what will either harm or empower them. It’s seductively easy to slip into patronizing condescension and predisposed belief than to listen to and learn from profound lived experience.

It’s also difficult to get others to care about an issue without ceding “ownership” of the issue. One can’t say labour rights “is an LGBT issue” in a way that means that LGBT people should be dictating what labour needs — but one must still recognize how the systematic dismantling of labour harms the economically vulnerable (including many LGBT people), and amplifies inequality in a deep and systemic way. Social movements usually see things as an all-or-nothing endeavor: either we own it, or we don’t have an obligation to care about it. That has to change. Incrementalism is a lie and steals fire from true, substantial change. Individual movements must let go of the “us first” impulse and start seeing “everyone together” as the goal.

In these ways, social movements might almost ever be stumbling recklessly toward unity.

So as much as things like lookism will surface in later generations for the trans* movement, it will be mitigated by the larger evolution of social movements. And as much as TERFism might seek to alienate trans* people from the feminist movement and the greater conversation about gender, it will similarly be mitigated by this. Exclusion will be a lesser factor (eventually). Learning to look inward and deal with our own biases and challenge ourselves to rise above them will be the next (and probably much harder) step. And it will be absolutely necessary.

It also won’t be complete or perfect. Social movements have a horrible record of backlash and subterfuge, mixed with self-sabotage. So it all might fail. Oligarchism might siphon off individual movements one at a time and absorb them. The lesbian and gay establishment are already vulnerable to this, for example, given the classism that infects the hierarchied LGB(T) establishment. It is here that the lateness of trans* empowerment and the emergence of poly folks, sex workers, asexuals, et al could prove a saving grace, and in which the LGB community’s gradual (stumbling) learning of how to support trans* people without trying to speak for them could provide lessons for changes to come.

But other assimilations could still be on the horizon. If the energy industry did a public about-face (for whatever motive), for example, it could possibly absorb the movement against global climate change. If that resulted in substantial reduction to the harm humans do to the planet, that would be great, yet I could see this sort of a time coming: environmentally-conscious alternatives become available and harnessed by the corporate sector, but the change will require wealth, and those who can’t afford to adapt are seen as the real / new menace. In this way, people who once lobbied against oil and gas become suddenly not able to afford the progress they fought for… one more way to keep the masses turned upon each other.

Each time the co-option of a movement happens, it steals progressives’ fire, and a movement toward critical mass to address oppression on a grander scale could fail. Society is at a pivotal time.

And as the political world polarizes, militarizes and veers into mass espionage, that could bode badly overall for social movements, which have historically been viewed as radical and threatening. So the political pressures will be very much against a coming together of progressives.

And the greatest fear of all is that the general public is remarkably and tragically apathetic. Just getting people to vote is a difficult task (and that’s if they’re allowed to under growing suppression). If progress is to happen, it needs something to motivate people in a grand way: not just to scare people about how bad things are getting (which there’s already plenty of, and can be demotivating of itself), but to inspire people with a new vision of how things can be. That vision is still being formulated.

So that’s the lens I look through.

Returning to trans* communities, the science will improve, certainly. As Monica says, we’ll see advances in surgical options, probably the biggest leaps deriving from cloning. Surgical advances on genital-specific health care are more challenging for trans* people, though, because it’s not just about a penis or vagina: the surface stuff can almost be done now (not quite for the guys, but the technology is almost there), but a lot of the inner biological infrastructure will take longer.

Additionally, we might discover the biological triggers (I suspect there’s more than one) that contribute to (as opposed to exclusively cause) someone being trans* — and that could be a mixed blessing of its own, depending on what that future generation decides to do with that new information.

The human rights advances will continue in the west, although Asia and Africa will take longer. If the social-left decolonizing of activism I wrote of earlier happens, this will significantly help in those regions, as much of the anti-LGBT sentiment there has gained traction because the political right figured out how to hijack the language of decolonialism and mask their own colonial aims. If the left comes together, the deceptive spin will eventually fail, and LGBT people will become properly recognized as the oppressed class rather than as a potential oppressor to fear.

The backlash to that will be that the political, corporate and social right will seek to dismantle the human rights mechanisms themselves: human rights commissions, rights laws, diversity policies… all of that will be framed as no longer relevant (i.e. “racism is over” / “feminists are the real oppressors,” etc.) and an impediment to the nation’s best interests (a slier way of saying corporate and religious interests). That’s a looming fight we’re just seeing emerge right now. We’re winning a lot of the battles, but the war is shifting to a new and larger front.

I apologize for that sounding preachy, something that is certainly not helped by referring to the royal “we.” I know we have our own individual limitations. We can’t do everything. Living in rural Alberta now, I’m very conscious about how much less I do and can do than before, so I don’t say any of the above with judgment. It’s simply my limited, fallible observation.

Push, pull, forward, backward. And gradually, we’ll get somewhere. But it will be rocky.

The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario is currently reviewing its Human Rights Code policy on conscience-based exemptions for medical professionals, and their effect on access to medical services.

This review was sparked by a number of news reports of doctors in Ontario and Alberta refusing to prescribe birth control because of their religious beliefs. In some of those cases, patients were refused in clinics where there was only one doctor on duty.

Concurrently, south of the border, the United States Supreme Court ruled in favour of a corporation’s right to deny medical insurance to its employees when doing so would violate the owners’ religious beliefs — a case that was specifically about access to contraception. The Hobby Lobby case has been followed by several new attempts to widen the exemption, and calls to extend it to other sectors and in ways that would allow businesses to refuse service to LGBT people.

These events reflect a major shift in the way that conscience rights are being seen and applied in North America. It is my hope that the experiences of trans* people in Alberta with conscience-based medical exemptions might provide some insights for those considering a conscience policy review in Ontario.

Alberta has had a policy for some time which allows a doctor to refuse to prescribe treatments that violate their religious beliefs in non-emergency situations. However, they are required to state that the refusal is because of their religious beliefs, and to provide a timely referral for patients to someone who will provide care, so that patients still receive service and experience a minimum of undue hardship (although to be fair, having to jump through referral hoops can be considered an undue hardship of itself, especially when one factors in the difficulties in scheduling time off from work and other real life concerns). Ontario’s policy is similar, though not identical.

Alberta’s policy was created to protect medical professionals from having to participate in any situation that might lead to an abortion. But in the past year, there has been an upsurge of discussion about the need for a religious or conscience-based exemption in every sector and every practice. Access to birth control is one of the pivotal issues in play in that discussion, although it is not the only one.

As an advocate for transsexual and transgender people, I’ve needed to assist a great number of people over the years who’ve been denied medical services because they’re trans* under Alberta’s conscience exemption policy. Sometimes people have even been denied services for things like urinary tract infections, routine checkups and cases of the flu. To be fair, the conscience exemption is not the only factor: denials are sometimes made by doctors who say they’ve never been trained in trans* health — although this complaint is made not only in regard to trans-specific health concerns, nor does there appear to be a willingness to learn from many of those doing the refusing.

Most often, trans* people who are refused care are also not provided a referral to anyone else. This exploits the public’s unfamiliarity with this part of the law, and that they’re entitled to a referral. It is certainly not every medical professional who refuses to assist, but it occurs frequently enough that the trans* community has had to try to keep a list of “trans-friendly” doctors — a list that is constantly plagued by doctors no longer being able to accept new patients, or making changes in their practice or habits. I’m always happy to add doctors to the list, with the only requirement be that they adhere to the WPATH Standards of Care (which is also the policy of Alberta Health Services). Two years ago, someone obtained a copy of our records and stormed into the offices of several listed clinics in Calgary, raising a ruckus about doctors’ willingness to treat trans* patients, and this resulted in several requests to be removed from our list.

Although commentators sometimes note theoretical possibilities like a Jehovah’s Witness practitioner denying blood transfusions, I can say from experience that conscience policies already can and do result in people being denied access to the care they need… and are not always given “timely” alternatives.

I am sensitive to a person’s right to opt out of something because their conscience, and not just a religious-based conscience. However, in practical experience, exemptions tend to be abused, and marginalized people pay the heaviest price. If there is to be a conscience-based exception to medical care, a province also needs to have a much better way of coordinating timely and accessible care alternatives, and better enforce the responsibility to provide those alternatives. In Alberta, this is difficult, since there is no centralized means of communicating with medical professionals and provide some forms of training after they’re already in the field, short of making laws — so strengthening things at a policy level proves difficult.

With the recent shift of thinking among the religious right toward making provinces “abortion-free” and denying access to previously uncontroversial things like birth control, this issue will worsen in coming years. If there is to be a conscience-based exemption to medical care, provinces need to seek a solution to the policy quandaries this creates now. For example, if a walk-in clinic’s only physician on duty will not prescribe contraception, then it’s worth investigating what responsibility the clinic should have in providing a doctor who will, and in a manner that suits the patient’s needs, rather than the doctor’s.

Or what responsibility the province is taking upon itself by sanctioning health care exemptions.

THE DEATH OF THE TRANSGENDER UMBRELLA: "If you've traveled anywhere among trans or LGBT blogs in the past year or three, you've inevitably come across an ongoing battle over labels, and particularly "transgender" as an umbrella term. It seems to be a conflict without end, without middle ground and without compromise..."

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